Matriarch (7 page)

But it was a fitting punishment for bringing a species almost to extinction. And, unlike those who had wiped out the dodo and the tiger and the orangutan, she was now at the mercy of her victims.

Shan would have told her that it served her bloody well right.

Saib seemed impatient.
We have many records to gather. They are scattered all over this region.
He shimmered with pulsing violet rings of light and began to move away. Three others moved with him, one a constant, unchanging deep blue, the other a slowly changing palette of scarlet and green that lost its red hues as it moved further away.
We have to hurry.

Lindsay didn't ask why. She began walking behind Saib and his companions as if she was trudging through deep snow, still trying to walk when she should have been swimming. “Come on, Rayat. Do as you're bloody told.”

“It's going to be something like raw shrimp and jellyfish,” he said.

She swayed a little and then found herself striking out, lifting her legs,
swimming.

“What is?”

“Lunch.”

Lindsay wondered how she was going to spend eternity trapped with Rayat. Concentrating on familiar loathing stopped her thinking about what she was becoming, and how she would get through the next hour without going insane.

Jejeno city, Ebj region, Umeh: Eqbas Vorhi ship 886-001-005-6, Ebj airspace

“Shit,” said Shan.

It was the first time she'd seen Umeh and it was every nightmare she'd ever had in Environmental Hazard Enforcement. The Eqbas ship hung about 1,000 meters above the surface of the city. Then its forward bulkhead and part of the deck became suddenly transparent.

She put her hand out instinctively to steady herself. She felt like she was falling; she'd done this before. She'd stared down through the viewplate of an automated shuttle as it plummeted towards the surface of Bezer'ej for the first time and the sensation made her nearly throw up.

For a second, she was close to doing that again.

Tight-packed buildings spread below her. There was nothing else but buildings upon buildings upon buildings, without the relief of greenery or open spaces or bodies of water. She'd seen Eddie's footage of Jejeno but it didn't come close to capturing the sheer scale of the urbanization.

Home,
said an uninvited feeling in her chest.
Home.

She tagged it as the scrap of isenj in her that went with the genetic memory. The movement she could see was packed bodies, a black and brown carpet of isenj moving through the impossibly crowded streets of the capital.
That
was inside her, somewhere.

“Shit,” she said again. Crowded cities meant high casualties in any disaster; unthinkably crowded ones like Jejeno set off all her copper's emergency responses. She braced herself not to attempt to
organize
things. “Remind me not to apply for a posting here. How the hell do they manage an environment like that?”

At least the deck was mostly opaque. Where it was wholly transparent, an Eqbas crew member gazed down apparently unconcerned. Shan decided that she could manage that too, and steeled herself to step into the transparent section to look down, overriding all her brain's hardwired insistence that she would fall.

Eddie joined her in contemplating the city beneath their feet, as casual as the Eqbas. His bee cam—the size of a small orange—settled a little above the deck, recording silently. Shan wondered if Eddie was putting on a show of bravado when he was actually shitting himself. Looking down on the city, she felt like a tourist in Hell.

“I can remember when this was all fields,” Eddie said cheerfully.

Ade chuckled. He hadn't said a word since they embarked. Shan wondered how she could call a truce with him now and waited for Eddie's reaction.

“Who do you actually know in the isenj government now, Eddie?”
You got Ual killed, you tosser. That's what happens when you play at politics.
“Any favors to call in?”

He shrugged. If he felt any responsibility for his part in Ual's death, he was doing a good job of hiding it. She suspected he was. “Ralassi. Ual's aide.”

“Well, at least we'll get a cup of coffee, then.”

“I'm good at making contacts. Trust my charm.”

Shan could see Serrimissani and Aitassi talking to Esganikan in her peripheral vision. Ussissi were scrupulously neutral; they might have evolved alongside the wess'har on Eqbas Vorhi, but they also moved across the galaxy with them, and they saw no conflict of interests in working for the isenj on Umeh. Neither did the wess'har. Ussissi didn't take sides and wess'har were completely comfortable with that. It was a political and social concept that defeated most humans, and Shan wasn't sure she grasped it herself.

And yet they were
loyal.
She thought of Vijissi, who wouldn't leave her side even when she spaced herself, and wondered if they had found his body yet.

I demand loyalty. But when I get it, it just makes me feel guilty.

The ship—which had no name, just a pennant code of ten digits—moved slowly towards the dome of Umeh Station and she caught sight of a gaping black crater fringed with shattered stumps of masonry. As her eye moved out along the blast radius, the buildings became more complete and
identifiable; but the shimmering river of movement made from living isenj was missing. She tried to estimate the size of the devastated area.

“Jejeno's antiaircraft battery, as was,” Eddie said helpfully. “Right in the center of the city. It made the mistake of opening fire on Esganikan when she came in to land last time.”

“And they're letting us come back?”

“You wait till you see the Eqbas countermeasures in action.”

Ade knelt down on the transparent section of deck and braced his elbows on it to get a better look. Shan squatted down beside him. It was surprising how fast you could get used to the disorientation, especially when you didn't want to lose face.

“I don't see anything in the way of ground defenses,” he said. “But then the wess'har don't invade, do they?”

The matriarchs of Wess'ej didn't: but the Eqbas wess'har did. Shan thought of the number of casualties and the chaos that an explosion of that size would have caused. It had been a long time since she'd done that kind of police work—cordoning streets, evacuating people, searching for body parts, bagging and tagging them—and in a way she missed it. Decisions had been simple and immediate. But her choices now were increasingly complex.

“Are they too scared to fire on us?”
Will Earth be?
“What's happening?”

“You'll see,” said Eddie.

Umeh Station was now almost immediately beneath them. The faceted sections of its dome gave it the appearance of a glittering, wind-whipped lake in the hazy sunlight, and then two bronze blobs like molten metal began falling slowly away from the hull towards it.

The ship was disassembling itself; it was splitting off sections and landing them.
Shuttles.
Shan had seen the liquid technology of the Eqbas, but watching a vessel dissolve
beneath
you was on the bowel-loosening side of fascinating. She thought of the metal hull of Aras's craft that had crumbled to harmless dust after crashing. It wasn't reassuring.

“I thought they'd make us rapid-rope down there,” she
said, finally offering Ade an olive branch. She couldn't stand his quiet misery. Shit, she loved the bastard. She was actually
in
love, which was new for her and not at all like the more gradual love she'd developed for Aras. Ade was one of the few wholly decent people she'd ever known, and an appealing mix of genuine modesty and solid, textbook masculinity. She found she had no defenses left even if she couldn't say the words. “Sod that.”

“If we cut our altitude.” He smiled, all eager gratitude. “I could train you, you know.”

“It's not like I can do myself any permanent damage, is it?”

“Easy. Piece of piss, Boss. Honest.”

The deck became instantly opaque. Esganikan strode across to them and pointed downwards. “The biodome is crowded. You might prefer to return to the ship's accommodation to sleep.”

She ushered the three of them towards the forward bulkhead, Serrimissani and Aitassi following. Shan wasn't wholly prepared for what happened next. The deck sagged beneath her boots. Her instinct was that she was falling, that something was going horribly wrong, but the logical part of her brain gave the alarmed monkey within a steadying slap that said
it's just the ship reforming, stupid.

And it did. It deformed and flowed into a well and then engulfed them in a capsule, like tropical fish in a plastic bag, safe but trapped. Ade caught her elbow to steady her.

Eddie looked slightly shaken but said nothing. Shan imagined he'd had his fair share of close calls.

“You realize you're probably going to run into the
Thetis
payload,” he said.

“Then it'll be like old times,” said Shan.

The last three scientists from her original mission were in Umeh Station now. Surendra Parekh had been executed, and Louise Galvin killed in crossfire with isenj; Sabine Mesevy had found god among the Constantine colonists, and Rayat was with the bezeri. That left Vani Paretti, Olivier Champciaux and the mission's doctor, Kris Hugel.

They were the harmless ones, except maybe for Hugel. If
Hugel came after her again about bloody
c'naatat,
she'd slot the bitch this time. Shan slid her hand into the back of her belt and felt the comforting shape of her 9mm handgun. Antique tech worked just fine.

The bronze globule of shiplet peeled away and ascended back to the main hull, leaving them standing in front of the dome in the shadow cast by the massive ship. A wide access road—a rare open space in Jejeno—ringed the building. For the first time Shan wondered what reception she might get, or if anyone would even know who she was.
Too bad.
She didn't give a fuck. She was well used to being the last person anyone wanted to see walk through the door.

Eddie nudged her in the back. “Look.”

Above her, the piece of Eqbas ship coalesced with the main vessel. Shan noticed the faint shimmer like a heat haze distorting the cityscape. So that was the defensive barrier. It reminded her of the biobarrier that separated the Constantine colony from the Wess'ej environment.

“It's like being under an upturned glass,” said Eddie. “But at least you don't need a breather mask inside the perimeter. I'm not sure if it makes me feel safe or trapped.”

“Safe,” said Ade, adjusting his rifle on its sling. “Take it from me.”

The airlock opened and Shan walked through first, even ahead of Esganikan. It never occurred to her to hang back, even though she wasn't sure where she was going. Umeh Station was hot and crowded, like an upmarket mall full of people in naval uniforms or coveralls. Vines covered the interior and there was a fountain with incongruously attractive foliage plants in the main plaza area, including a dwarf banana tree with hands of fruit forming on it. Ade seemed very interested in the bananas.

Umeh Station had been designed for two hundred but now housed three hundred stranded humans, all that were left of the
Actaeon
mission. Everyone who was
not
here—everyone who had chosen to stay on board the FEU warship—was dead, killed because the wess'har had destroyed the ship in
retaliation for the bombing of Ouzhari and the deaths of Vijissi…and
herself.

Jesus Christ. I'm walking in here alive. And they're dead.

It topped the list of bizarre moments in her career. Maybe
Actaeon
's crew would find it equally weird. And if she'd doubted they'd know who she was, she was wrong.

Who else could she have been?

“Here we go,” said Eddie. He tossed the bee cam a few inches in the air as if he was flipping a coin and it floated obediently beside him. Shan was aware of Esganikan watching with faint curiosity. “Don't bite anyone's head off, will you?”

The silence started a few meters from her and spread, the hum of voices fading in concentric rings like a shockwave traveling out from a detonation. She could almost see it. For a copper, it wasn't an unusual reception.

But she was a dead woman. They'd been sure of it. So had she.

Site contractors and crew stared. Shan stared back as only she could, hands on hips, feet apart, something she'd honed to perfection over the years. Then they suddenly appeared to have something more pressing to do and walked away. The hum of conversation filled the dome again. Ade nudged her. It was only then that she realized he was standing behind her with his rifle in his hands, finger outside the trigger guard but leaving no doubt about his ability to fire.

“And I thought it was my friendly face,” she said.

“Might have been, Boss.” He slung the rifle again. “You can look like a bulldog chewing a wasp when you put your mind to it.”

Shan waited for Esganikan to make a move. “This doesn't strike me as an ideal place for your headquarters.”

“It is not,” said Esganikan. “But it is a neutral point for the isenj, and convenient to contain for the time being. Ual's replacement is meeting us here for discussions about the environmental readjustment of Umeh.”

Eddie and Ade glanced at each other and Shan knew ex
actly what they were thinking. For a species that had never had a need for diplomacy, Eqbas had a curious collection of terms that sounded like euphemisms in translation, a habit they certainly didn't have. They
adjusted
planets. They culled and they rolled back ecosystems and they
restored,
whether the dominant species on that planet wanted it or not—
especially
if they didn't want it.